FutureFuel.io, a three-year-old fintech startup based in Back Bay, raised a $11.2 million Series A round to add sales and marketing employees to its team of 12 and expand the features of its student debt employer benefits SaaS platform.
Rethink Impact, a female-led venture capital firm with offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, led the round, which brings the total funding to date to $15.7 million.
The company's platform helps employees not only to manage, but also to understand where they are in the process of paying back their student debt, and develop strategies and monthly goals linked to their income and spending habits.
"Our users describe their student debt in stages of grief," said Laurel Taylor, CEO of FutureFuel.io. "Users, honestly, have no idea how many loans they have, what the interest rates are on their many loans, or when their student loan debt will be simply paid off."
As the average student debt for college graduates continues to climb, many employees who are new to the workforce start their career with financial setbacks on their shoulders. Nationally, about two in three college seniors who graduated from public and private nonprofit colleges in 2017 had student loan debt, owing an average of $28,650.
Taylor, a former Google employee in Cambridge with a credit score of over 800, was offered a 9 percent interest rate on a student loan to finance her MIT Sloan MBA. That was one of the reasons that prompted her to start FutureFuel.io in June 2016. Around a year and a half ago, she got in touch with Jenny Abramson, founder and managing partner of Rethink Impact, in New York. Abramson, who's joining the company’s board of directors alongside Jim Palermo (a former vice chairman of BNY Mellon), invited Taylor to pitch her company in November 2018.
Thanks to the funding, FutureFuel.io will add salespeople, marketers and frontend engineers to its team. As for product innovation, it will continue building capabilities for Round Up, one of six product offerings of its platform, which sweeps spare change to the user’s highest-interest-rate loan via a user’s spending habits and goal-based behaviors.
The financing round included participation from Breton Capital, First Data, G9 Ventures, The Impact Engine, Reach Capital, Salesforce Ventures, SixThirty and Vulcan Capital.
